


one of these nights I'll sleep with the windows down

by Koeji



Series: Troublemaker Doppelgänger [1]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Animal Death, Explicit Consent, F/F, Hunting, Mentor/Protégé, Mild Gore, Pre-MGS3, gore tag is just for the animal death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 03:51:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11455389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koeji/pseuds/Koeji
Summary: A short ways away, she sees the bullet that The Boss plucked from the brain of the doe. It glints in the sunlight like the edges of their knives, casting slivers of light into the forest, dark even in daylight.This is the knife I used to carve my first deer,thinks the girl who will be called EVA.It was the first doe I ever killed. And it was so incredibly warm on the inside.





	one of these nights I'll sleep with the windows down

**Author's Note:**

> I finished MGS3 for the first time this past December, and the moment EVA said The Boss recognized her because she used to be a teacher at the Philosophers' school, I knew exactly what I had to do. This has been in the works since then because I'm the world's slowest writer and I haven't written smut in three years. But it's finally off my back now. 
> 
> This is the first of a pair of fics I'm working on, examining similar themes. The next one will hopefully come out sometime within the next 15 years. Title is taken from Lucy Dacus's song "Troublemaker Doppelganger," which is a great banger for EVA if you're inclined to listen to it. There's also a very mild reference to my previous fic "Sixth of June."
> 
> Anyway, this turned out a lot longer than I expected it to be, but hopefully you think it's worth it. The premise might be implausible but if your fic isn't 85% self-indulgent and 15% autobiographical then what's the point, am I right. Have at ya.

The girl who will one day be known as EVA quickly learns that a great number of strange things occur in the woods. In their unmatched quietude, her mind spins its own shadows and sounds and shadows of sounds; the darkness wets her grip on her knife, and her own hair on her skin is the approach of an insidious insect. Even doused with the distant chill of the ocean, the forest has its own heat. Its fanning leaves spread and close at her touch, sticky her fingers, and when she lays with her belly against the forest floor, she feels its heat seeping through her uniform. She understands that all the forest is a mother; all who are inside it are its children, borne in the warmth of a blue-green womb. She is comforted and threatened all the same.

At night, she watches the early morning moon lay itself on the shining pupils of wild animals who know these places far better than her—animals like The Boss. The Boss is never too close nor too far away; she waits precisely where she means to, with her eyes against the moonlight. Whatever The Boss does, she does like the watery eyes of a deer in the night, certain in her uncertainty. She looks the same behind the scope of a sniper rifle as she looks when she wields a knife, empty-souled, every muscle aligned. The two of them are deer hunting; the girl who will be called EVA is expected to bring the beast down, but The Boss has already accounted for the possibility of her failure. She likely already knows where another deer will be in an hour’s time. This is quietly infuriating in all the ways The Boss probably wants it to be. The girl who will be called EVA aligns her rifle. In the stillness of the forest, each movement is a promise. She thinks of this fact when she looks at The Boss squatting in the brush—each swelling shoulder a symphony.

The most unexpected movement is the slowest—a female sauntering into view, neck bent deep into the grass. The girl who will be called EVA knows the pleasure and sadness of being the watcher of the watched—wonders, like most people, if in the end she herself would prefer a sudden or foreseen death. But, as she raises her rifle, she knows she can’t afford such thoughts for a deer. She hears The Boss’s voice inside her. _Line from tear duct to tear duct. Two-and-a-half inches above that line, right in the center. The brain is an instant kill._

She wonders if the deer makes a sound as it dies; if it does, she can’t hear it over the boom of the rifle. The doe falls instantly. After a moment of stillness, she sees The Boss rise, flashing a thumbs-up.

* * *

She’s been with The Boss for a month now, in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their location has been stable for some time now, in a small cabin far removed from any semblance of civilization. They have their own rooms, at least; such privacy has become a luxury. Before they moved to the cabin, their place of rest changed often—some nights they spent on the forest floor, some in tents. Some around fires and some with nothing but the stars and the heat of the Earth to warm them. She always liked the fireside nights the best, when The Boss would stay up to stand watch. They were never in any true danger—this excursion was only an extended training exercise, after all, funded entirely by the school and the Philosophers—but The Boss insisted, if only to give her student some experience with it. The Boss standing watch was a sight—the shadows of her cheekbones, the play of the firelight on her blonde hair. Around the fire, her features softened; maybe such softening was something she could afford to do as a faux-watchman. To the girl who would be called EVA, it seemed as if an endless parade of shadows and beings played across The Boss’s face as she watched the flames. Perhaps, in another time, with other people, this had often been a time of softening for her, and that comfort had settled permanently into her bones, to be roused at the sight of a fire. At times, through half-lidded eyes, the girl who would be called EVA caught her in the whisper of a smile, mumbling pleasantly into the darkness.

This was another time that the girl who would be called EVA knew the pleasure and sadness of being the watcher of the watched—but not quite, because even when The Boss wasn’t turned her way, she still felt her eyes upon her. She quietly wondered if she would feel that way for the rest of her life.

After the sun rises, the two of them set to work with the carcass. The Boss sets down a tarp outside of the cabin to catch the blood. The veil of early morning fog soaks the deer’s fur like it does the women’s hair. They have the tools and the means to sling it up, skin it cleanly, but The Boss insists on a lesson in field dressing. “You’ve gone over this process in your lessons, but the actual experience is invaluable,” she tells the girl who will be called EVA. “If you’re in the field and lack the knowledge or skills to sustain yourself with something as simple as this, you won’t last for long.”

She watches her unzip its body like the back of a woman’s dress, helps to harvest the scarlet meat. As she begins to make her own incisions, The Boss places a guiding hand over hers, adding pressure and lifting it. “Don’t burst the stomach.” Her receding fingers drag errant beads of blood between the girl’s knuckles. The Boss opens the head, excises the bullet from the brain with the tip of her knife. The gentleness and precision of it play on repeat in the girl’s mind. “Use every part of it, if you can,” The Boss says. “If you have some, the brains are good with brown sugar.”

The girl isn’t sure whether or not she should laugh. The Boss seems serious, but her faint smile confirms that even she can acknowledge the absurdity of it. The two of them share a chuckle.

“Where did you learn all of this?” asks the girl.

The Boss pauses. “I learned as I went, mostly,” she says. “I went through a lot of trial and error. Eventually, my methods were corrected by soldiers who knew better, and I improved on my own from there.”

The Boss looks over the length of her knife, glinting in the sunlight with untold moisture, rivulets of blood. The tip is blackened with the slightest of powders and a few clinging pinkish twists of brain—the same color as The Boss’s tongue when she brings it to her lips and plucks a bit of it from the blade. The movement is so light and soft that the girl who will be called EVA doesn’t even see her tongue touch the metal. She is thinking of that knife carving her bullet from the meaty mass and the single smear of red on The Boss’s lower lip when The Boss extends the knife to her. The Boss turns the cutting edge skyward, salvaging a second bit of pink that had halfway fallen off. The girl who will be EVA wonders, at first, if it’s a trick; she wonders if she _should_ know the toxicity levels of fresh deer brains, because she sure doesn’t—wonders if The Boss knows that she doesn’t know. Like Snow White and her stepmother, she thinks, and the half-poisoned apple sliced down the middle. But she has never known The Boss to be anything like a wicked stepmother; she is cruel in many ways, but never wicked. A woman who so valued loyalty, even to the dead, watched the night sky for every cruelty against a young girl, closed her eyes and held her breath at the moment of a creature’s death—a woman like The Boss could never be wicked.

The girl who will be EVA takes The Boss’s knife between her teeth, tugging off the pink worm. She’d expected to be disgusted, but the thing is actually mostly tasteless. She’ll remember the bit of brain for its texture, and she’ll remember the moment The Boss put her knife between her teeth.

“What do you think?” asks The Boss.

“Not much of a flavor,” she says. “Don’t they say eating animal brains makes you smarter?”

The Boss gives a tight-lipped chuckle. “If that were true, I’d be a much smarter woman than I am. As for the taste...” She kneels beside the carcass again, pulling meat from the deer’s hind. “Brown sugar. I mean it.”

The afternoon is long, and the deer’s red body lies between them, growing sparser and shiny with white bone. The girl who will be EVA finds herself longing for one of the sporadic northwest showers that have ambushed them so often. Wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of a bloodied hand, The Boss rises from her knees to a squat. The girl continues to harvest, even as her own sweat drips onto the exposed muscles, where she swears she can hear it evaporate on contact with a hiss. The heat of an animal is even more profound to her than the heat of the forest; the girl who will be EVA knows the value of the heat of a living body, the hum of its circulation, how it slows and quickens in the night. She knows it better in other people’s bodies than she does her own. She has seen how the doctrine of a world can be undone by a single man’s heat, where and when he must expel it—into whom, and why. If she cut him open, he would look so much like this deer. Her sweat would sizzle inside him.

But this is a doe, she thinks. The Boss could cut her downward and see it so easily—how different she was from a buck. Lacking in horns, but hosting innumerable possibilities of new life. And still that same, incessant heat clinging to its skin.

“You’re doing well,” The Boss says. When the girl looks up at her, The Boss’s arms fall between her legs, fingers interlaced, a slight smile upon her lips. In these rare instances, the girl understands that she is learning more important things than can be taught under the threat of danger. “When it comes to butchering an animal, a thousand people will tell you a thousand different ways to do it. And they’ll likely all say that their way is the best one. The important thing is to be able to adapt your process to whatever suits your present needs the best.

“Do you think your way of doing it is the best?” asks the girl.

The Boss smiles. “Of course I do.”

The way she says it sends a jolt through the girl—a jolt like fear, like the shock she feels when The Boss approaches her silently in the forest without her noticing. That’s what she calls the beginning of the feeling. She’s less sure of what to call its aftertaste; gratitude, perhaps. Above all else, the girl who will be called EVA feels supremely grateful that she is able to see a woman like The Boss smile in the particular way she does. Her smile smacks of a sense of compatriotism the girl hasn’t felt in quite some time. Not even among the other girls back at the school, as tightly knit as they were. They knit themselves together out of desperation and urgency, a preemptive strike against the coming severances of the outside world. The love in The Boss’s smile—the girl feels brazen calling it _love_ , but this is yet another of the strange certainties that The Boss somehow bestows so easily—is a love forged past fire. It is enduring and knowing and giving of itself in so many ways that the girl thinks it shouldn’t.

But how big of an idiot must she be, the girl thinks of herself, to worry about _The Boss_.

When they’ve finished, The Boss sets the bones and innards aside and folds the bloodied tarp. They’ll carry it down to the lake to wash it later, along with their dirty clothes. Next they’ll have to salt the meat, but for now the girl sits cross-legged on the ground and cleans the blood from their tools. Her pulse pounds in her fingertips.

A short ways away, she sees the bullet that The Boss plucked from the brain of the doe. It glints in the sunlight like the edges of their knives, casting slivers of light into the forest, dark even in daylight. _This is the knife I used to carve my first deer_ , thinks the girl who will be EVA. _It was the first doe I ever killed. And it was so incredibly warm on the inside._

She feels The Boss sit down beside her with a sigh. The air is cooler now, but the girl who will be EVA feels like that bulk of sticky heat has lodged inside her, opening her up.

“Do you think you could do that all by yourself if you had to?” asks The Boss.

“Harvest a deer, you mean?”

“Yes.”

The girl looks over the pile of red meat they’ve amassed, thinks of its heat and the clean knife in her hands. “It’s easy enough to take one down, but the process is difficult to follow, and it’s far too much meat for just one person,” she says. “I could probably do it if I had to, but it seems more practical to stick with small game.”

“It is a lot, even for two people. It’ll last us through the end of our training. But don’t worry about it too much if you think the process is difficult. It’s unlikely that you’ll need this level of survival skills in your line of work. More than anything, this was just something extra I chose to teach you on my own.” She dips her red hands into the bucket of water the girl used to clean their tools. Holding them aloft in the air, The Boss breathes in, gazing at the tree line. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” she says.

“What is it?”

“Your job,” The Boss replies. “...Or I should say, your future job. Do you like it?”

 _Your future job._ The girl isn’t sure how to answer a question about something that stands as a mere shadow of a concept. She knows The Boss isn’t asking about her training as a soldier, weapons and combat and utmost loyalty to the Philosophers. The other side of her training is nebulous at best, even by the Philosophers’ standards; “charm school,” they call it, as if it were the same as any other finishing school, sending off its graceful graduates into high society, empty-headed and ready to be filled by a husband. That last part isn’t far off the mark, the girl supposes, but she can’t recall anyone in the school ever mentioning marriage. The girls operate with an eventual understanding of what they are being prepared for. Their lessons are in preparations and aftermaths, never the act itself: how to look at a man over drinks, social niceties during dinner. Darkness. How to transmit state secrets from his bedroom closet. Some girls learn sooner than others what to do in the darkness. The school’s dorms are still co-ed for a reason.

The girl who will be called EVA, beautiful and magnanimous in the eyes of the Philosophers’ young men, learned sooner. She’d been called a “natural.” The word clung to her like the heat of the deer’s skinned body—sweet and deeply sickening in a way she couldn’t describe. She thinks of herself standing next to The Boss, decorated in innumerable regalia hard-earned on the battlefield, and lets her eyes fall to the ground.

“It’s—a blessing, in some ways. They say I’ll probably be spared from the worst of combat. Fancy dinners with important people and all that,” the girl replies. “We’re sometimes envied for that, I think. But...”

“I don’t mean to make presumptions,” The Boss says. “Espionage is a noble pursuit, much more difficult than most people realize. But there are challenges of the battlefield that are unique to female soldiers—especially ones like yourself. There are some things I wish I’d learned from other women in my field when I was younger. Things that you won’t learn just by being in the field, or in the Philosophers’ schools. There are some things you must do in the battlefield to sustain your life outside of it.”

“Like what?”

The girl’s hand is gently pulled from the knife’s handle. The Boss lays it facing upward against her own palm, traces the lines of it with her index finger like a clairvoyant, and for a moment the girl believes that The Boss can see all that she imagines she can see. Her fingertips are cool, but rough, with errant tags of calcite clutching to the hills and valleys of the girl’s palm. They linger at the small, hard pockets at the bases of the girl’s fingers, where her skin has already hardened against the grip of a gun. The girl is sure it would tickle if those parts of her skin weren’t already so numb, and if her mind could afford energy to anything other than the control of her shallow breathing. “For instance. You’re part of the women’s espionage class,” The Boss says. “If you can keep your hands from becoming calloused and hard from the labors of battle and survival, that’s all the better for you. It takes a certain kind of man to love a woman with hands as hard as his. You’re fashioning yourself as their fantasy, after all, not their equal. A man doesn’t like a woman with hard hands because it means she’s already seen more than he could ever show her.”

As The Boss places her other hand over the girl’s, the girl watches its shifting blue veins. Her fingers are long, fingernails short, still carrying flecks of blood beneath them. They are old hands; far older than The Boss herself.

“My hands hold weapons,” she says. “But your hands _are_ your weapons. You see...” She uncovers the girl’s palm, placing her own beside it. Again, the girl who will be EVA thinks of fairy tales: the satin beauty of Cinderella’s dress, compared to the tarnished rags it becomes after midnight. “In war, men pour their bodies into tools. Weapons. They store their lives in bullets and blades. I do as well, to an extent; it’s the kind of soldier I chose to be. To be able to place your locus of violence into a tool external to yourself is a very useful thing—but alienating to the self. People were not born with guns in their hands; from the beginning, our means of resolving conflict have always been channeled directly through the body. Fists, muscles. Relying on a man-made weapon is not our natural way of doing things. In doing so, we divorce our very selves from the bodies we rely on. The body itself becomes a means to an end.” She pauses. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The girl raises her eyes to The Boss’s and half-nods.

“The same could be said for _your_ body—in a different way,” she continues. “Saying that your body is a means to an end would more commonly make sense to other people. But to wage war with a woman’s body is a different experience entirely. As women, we are in possession of the single greatest weapon, which is also our greatest vulnerability. To wage war as a woman, you must willingly place yourself in that liminal space between vulnerability and power; you must draw on a legacy of feminine weakness, and rely on that weakness being reflected in a man’s eyes, in order to hold power over him. But that power will still feel like filth upon you; wrongly so, but it will.

“Just as weapons are unnatural to our conflicts, that imbalance of power is unnatural to us. You will never truly understand your body as your own unless you have the chance to experience it outside of that liminal space, on your own terms. But even relations of love between a man and a woman carry the implications of that imbalance at their core—even if the love makes it more palatable. As the kind of woman you are, you’ll notice it right away.” The Boss pauses. “This is another lesson that won’t be taught to you in school—much less on the battlefield.”

The girl swallows. “So...how can I...”

“I recommend seeking sexual partners who aren’t men.”

The interjection is so placid that the girl thinks she must have imagined it at first; it’s too scripted and too jarring, hearing those words from The Boss. Her mouth opens and closes twice, three times, before she can make a sound. “S-sorry, I...”

The Boss’s eyes narrow. “Are you the sort who takes issue with people like that?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.” The girl shakes her head. “I was just...surprised, is all.”

“You wouldn’t be if you’d had the chance to actually work with other women in the field,” says The Boss. “Regardless of whatever they consider their natural inclinations to be, women have an innate understanding of the things I’m talking about, whether they realize it or not. That extends outside the battlefield as well.”

“So, you...”

“I’m not here to give you a personal history,” she replies. “It’s just a personal suggestion, should you find the opportunity. It’s the sort of thing that can’t be described well outside of the experience itself. I wouldn’t have bothered to try to put it into words as extensively as I did if I didn’t believe you could genuinely benefit from it.”

The Boss’s hand is hot against the girl’s. Her knuckles brush The Boss’s calluses. They’re softly white and large, like the rest of her, or so the girl thinks when her vision is filled with her, and she is so much closer than the sun. The images in her mind do her no favors. “Thank you,” she mutters.

For a moment, The Boss’s other hand closes over the girl’s.

* * *

She wears her nightgown as far as The Boss’s door. The cabin is small, but at night its warmth traverses and dissipates down its narrow halls as easily as those of a large, hollow mansion. Even the girl’s nights on the forest floor were, at times, warmer. But the girl values what few commodities she is allowed. It’s blessing enough that she is allowed to have her own room with her own bed, and that The Boss is allowed hers.

The girl even considers her nightgown to be something of a blessing; it is similar to what she wore to sleep at the school, but she hasn’t seen anything like it over the long month she’s spent with The Boss. She’s become used to the feeling of mud cracking on her knees as she curls them up to her chest, the forest’s leaves tickling her bare shoulders as she breathes her nightly breaths; only the inimitable darkness forming its ghostly softness around her recalls memories of the girlish nightclothes she left behind. To find a dress like this one stashed in the bottom drawer of her room’s nightstand seemed almost a form of trickery; something placed there by her superiors for her to find, to lull her back into her schoolgirl comfort.

How much of this is a form of trickery, the girl wonders, and how much of it is her own mind running circles around itself, overthinking all of the wrong things, poring over thoughts and intentions and cues and misgivings. She wonders if The Boss will be awake when she goes in. There’s no light under her door, but the girl can imagine The Boss’s awareness stalking the room like a many-antlered deer. The girl knows that no move she makes will ever completely surprise The Boss. That knowledge is somehow comforting.

She loosens the string of her collar, feels the ruffles relax around her shoulders, kneads the silk beneath her toes as it falls to the floor. The chill of the cabin overcomes her.

She recalls the first boy she slept with--how she had stepped out of a nightgown just like this one, fragile and translucent like the shed skin of a snake, but she hadn’t emerged anew from it. Her own nakedness was a skin she stepped into--a skin she would never be able to shed. In showing herself to him, she had entered an arena where she would fight until her dying day, always against an unseen, ill-defined enemy attacking from the shadows--men, women, desire, danger. But she can almost see that enemy now, can almost see the arena with its multitudes of ghastly spectators, its domed blue sky of promise and obligation.

As she opens the door, she thinks of The Boss and the knife between her teeth.

She’s asleep--or, at least, as asleep as The Boss can be. As the girl who will be EVA crosses the room toward her sleeping back, she can feel the thinness of the air permeated by The Boss’s presence. The eyes of a beast in the night. The girl eyes the yellow strands of The Boss’s hair on her pillowcase, the half-melted candle and dark hardcover book on her nightstand--fragments of mundanity that she almost feels guilty seeing as she pulls back the single sheet covering The Boss’s figure and slips in beside her, the texture of the cloth on her skin sending shivers down her body.

It is the sheets that make her shiver and nothing more, because the space beside The Boss is even warmer than she had imagined it would be--like the difference between standing upright in the forest and laying her body against its floor.

As she fixes her eyes on the small of The Boss’s back, sees her shoulders heave the smallest, lightest sigh, but heavy with acknowledgement. Her voice cracks with fatigue when she finally speaks.

“I was half-expecting you to do this,” she says. “But I’ll admit that the state of undress is something of a surprise. Rather bold of you.”

The girl’s eyes go from the iris of The Boss’s right eye, to the bridge of her nose, to her lips and down to her own chest. She believes she can see her heartbeat pulsing under the sheet. “Are you angry with me?”

With a vague groan, The Boss turns her body over to its side. “If you really thought this was something I would be angry about, I don’t think you would have done it.” She sits up and reaches over the girl’s body for the book of matches on the nightstand. She sparks the match, then holds it out to the girl. For a moment, the girl thinks she would be content with the feeling of The Boss’s fingertips on hers as she passes the match, and then that she would be content if the flame burned down to her fingers, if she could burn for her, but The Boss nods to the candle and the girl understands. The candle is lit and the girl douses the flame with her breath.

“You want to ask something of me,” The Boss says, features in firelight. It reminds the girl of the nights when The Boss sat by their fire and laughed with ghosts into the night, but her face now isn’t so relaxed, so pleased; she looks like the kind of woman many people have asked many things of before.

The girl sits up beside The Boss, lets the sheet fall from her chest. “I was just...thinking about the things you said earlier, about men and women. And women and...other women. About learning to--”

“I didn’t mean me,” The Boss says. She pauses, and then a shade passes over her face with a sigh. “I don’t mean to sound harsh. It isn’t because I find you unappealing or think ill of you. Only that you’re--”

“Too young?”

“...My _student_ ,” The Boss corrects her. “Though truthfully, I think it’s ridiculous that I’m expected to teach you how to kill but not how to love a woman. I’ve found that both can be equally life-preserving. My misgivings mostly stem from your methods. I don’t want you to feel like you need to use your body as a weapon to get what you want from me. My answer--whether positive or negative--wouldn’t have changed if you had asked me in the light of day, fully clothed.”

The girl traces the shapes of her bare thighs rising under the sheets. She knows how foolish it was for her to come to The Boss like this, as if she had the same proclivities as a pubescent boy whose furthest contact with a woman was his member pressed against a faded centerfold. The Boss is beyond petty seduction. The Boss is a different sort of being entirely—and perhaps that is why the girl wanted to come to her like this, young and foolish and eager, reveling in the knowledge of what she doesn’t know. Being by The Boss’s side, the girl had always felt she was living beside a force, rather than a human being, save for those small ephemera she would catch out of the corner of her eye: The Boss’s laugh, the sigh of her shoulders, dripping, clinging strands of hair on her face after a dip in the river. At some point, the girl who will be EVA came to long for those ephemera, to be their cause, and sitting unclothed in bed beside The Boss is the closest she has felt to becoming one of them herself. The feeling makes her reckless again—pushy, indulgent, knowing, as part of her knows she should be. “Does that mean I still have a chance for a positive response?” she asks.

“...That’s the part of what I said that you zoned in on, I see.” The Boss sighs again, but this one is lighter, a formality of a sigh; the girl doesn’t want to get her hopes up, but she would almost call it resignation. She feels The Boss’s eyes on her thighs, her breasts. It’s such an unexpected, downright human appraisal that the girl almost laughs. It’s a relief, in a way. “I want you to understand,” The Boss begins, softly. “Understand that I’m not ashamed of this, but I wouldn’t do this for just anyone. I truly believe that this is a necessary experience for you, both as a soldier and a woman.”

The Boss’s fingertips brush the line of the girl’s jaw as she leans toward her. “This is a survival tactic.”

When The Boss first kisses her, it feels like a greeting: slow, pronounced, like a stranger telling her their name for the first time. Its intentions are beyond romance, beyond pretense, even as the girl returns the gesture, and she realizes that this is a kiss purely of kindness, without expectation. The Boss herself seems to treat it like a kind greeting, an opening door; the moment the girl settles into the kiss, The Boss is elsewhere, her lips at the corner of her mouth, her neck, and the fingers which had held the girl’s jaw aloft like a model under assembly have risen to her hair, thumb grazing the shell of her ear as The Boss pulls her closer. Her kisses are light, methodical even, as if they’ve fallen into an extended greeting, a prolonged announcement of intentions. Were this coming from anyone else, the girl would feign delight, utter some muffled, mustered moan, but with each stroke of The Boss’s fingertips against her skull and small hum from her throat and heated sigh against her neck, the girl is reminded of the reality of the woman beside her. The girl looks down on herself, thinking once again of the first boy she had, how little and much she had known, how different the feeling had been.

When the girl who will be EVA looks up again, she meets The Boss’s eyes and lowered brows. Her hand cups the girl’s cheek now, thumb stroking idly over her cheekbone. She feels The Boss’s breasts pressed against her own. She wonders if she could feel The Boss’s heartbeat, but even if she could, she’s sure that her own heartbeat would drown it out entirely.

“You will tell me,” The Boss says, “if you are uncomfortable at any time. And you will not pretend to feel or not feel anything you do or do not. Understand?”

The girl nods, heavy-chested. The Boss’s fingers trace the line of her jaw down to her chin as The Boss adjusts herself, shifting atop the girl, one knee between her thighs. Again the girl is keenly aware of her own nakedness, is equal parts anxious and ashamed. It’s a stark mixture of emotions she hasn’t felt in some time. But The Boss isn’t much better, only wearing a long nightshirt. The girl watches her shift her body in the candlelight, shirt hem riding up the muscles of her thighs.

“And hey,” The Boss murmurs, “Try to have some fun.”

As the girl nods again, The Boss’s fingers flick away from her chin, and the girl swears she wears one of the gentlest, happiest smiles she’s seen on her.

She raises her chin to kiss her again, but The Boss’s mouth is on her neck again, dragging hot breaths mixed with the cool of her tongue across her skin. She covers her Adam’s apple, pinching at the edges with her teeth like a Venus fly trap as her hands slide down the girl’s flanks to her waist. The Boss’s hands idle there, cupping the curves of the girl’s waist leading to her hips, fingers reaching for the small of her back before they draw the girl’s groin flush against her thigh. The girl inhales quickly, and she feels The Boss chuckle against her chest. “You almost sound like you haven’t done this before,” she murmurs.

“Not...not like this, at least.” The girl sighs, tries to mimic The Boss’s small carefree laugh. With a smile, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear, The Boss leans further into her; the girl feels her own wetness against her thigh, presses harder in, lets out a sigh of a moan.

“What do you like?” The Boss asks softly. One hand has traveled up from the girl’s waist, and for a moment the girl wishes her ribs were an endless road, that she could feel The Boss’s palm traveling there forever. She encircles her breast, tracing its distant outlines, kneading the pliant skin beneath her fingertips, brushing her thumb over its peak. A hum catches in the girl’s throat, hesitant but pleased; she wonders if she looks too eager, too embarrassingly inexperienced, but she isn’t used to this warm weight flooding her body, filling her throat to bursting. Honesty without pretense. Maybe, she thinks, this is what The Boss meant when she asked her not to pretend not to feel anything she did.

“I don’t...I don’t know,” the girl murmurs, her last words caught in an upward flight of voice as The Boss’s tongue finds her other breast. With a whimper, the girl threads her fingers through The Boss’s hair, down her neck, all at once realizing how little she’s touched her and badly she needs to. _I like this_ , she thinks, wants to say, _I like you_ , but the words are thick and sticky and won’t leave her tongue; she’s all sighs and gasps and The Boss’s slight, loving bites and quickening and slowing movements. She finds words that are lighter and just as true: “I just...want to touch you more.”

The Boss stops, her eyes caught in a snare of confirmation; for a moment, the girl wonders if she’s asked something wrong, overstepped a boundary, but before the moment ends The Boss smiles, muttering an “Of course.” Sitting upright, she lifts the nightshirt over her head and discards it on the floor.

The girl who will be called EVA has seen The Boss’s body before—at least from the back, when she washed her body in forest rivers, pulling her clinging golden hair from her back into a ponytail, or when she dressed herself in the early hours of the morning. There was a certain unspoken intimacy in The Boss revealing even that much to her, the girl thought, as if The Boss were a ghost of some sort who would shrink from existence if one saw too much of her. But The Boss was far too much to be a ghost; the girl was certain of it now, seeing her form in the glowing candlelight, hard shadows laying over the form of a beast, as corporeal as the girl had felt her to be. The girl’s eyes settle into the space between ghost and beast and she tries to place herself among it as a girl of flesh and blood—a girl whose body, more than anything, more than it ever has before, wants to become a beast itself. As The Boss leans over her, presses their foreheads gently together, the girl’s eyes trace the curves of her chest, of what the shadows have left behind: a white, raised scar curving around her breast and down her stomach, fading into a milky pink in the orange light. A snake carved out with intention. The girl who will be called EVA wonders whose intention it held: The Boss’s, or someone else.

“It’s a sad story,” whispers The Boss. Only then does the girl realize her fingers have been tracing the shape of the scar down The Boss’s body, softly and reverently. “A love story, actually.”

“A love story?”

The Boss nods. “A woman’s body can endure just as much pain for love as it does for war. Don’t forget that.”

Her fingers linger over The Boss’s stomach, where the scar comes to an end. She can think of only a few situations that would leave such a scar—only one of which is likely, as unfortunate as it is. The girl who will be called EVA folds that possibility into a dark envelope in her mind. This is another kind of covenant between women. “I think it’s beautiful,” says the girl.

The Boss closes her eyes and smiles. “You’ll have scars of your own one day. Though hopefully none like this,” she says. “I hope you’ll think of them the same way.”

She presses her lips to the girl’s again, intending another brief greeting, a cursory embrace, but before The Boss can retreat the girl holds fast to her jaw with both hands, holding it in place as she deepens the kiss. She feels The Boss stiffen in her hands—whether out of shock or hesitation or both, she doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to know—but the girl runs her tongue over The Boss’s lips and soon meets hers, warm and eager in a way that sparks electric through her body. The mere idea that The Boss could _want_ her like this—that she would lean further in, offer herself to her, even utter small gasps and muffled moans against her mouth as the girl’s hands wander down The Boss’s body, fondling her breasts, tracing the lines of her muscles down her abdomen—threatens to overwhelm her senses.

“Move your hips up,” The Boss whispers. As the girl adjusts her body, she feels her lower muscles jump in surprise as The Boss’s hand cups her sex, rolling its heavy hardness under her palm as her fingers teasingly brush the folds. The girl hears herself moan a soft _oh_ against The Boss’s mouth. “Is this okay?” she asks, and the girl’s response is more of a pleading whimper than a word, but The Boss kisses her again and heaves a pleased sigh. Her fingers are purposefully languid, circling every part of her with precision, relishing the girl’s wetness, coating themselves with her. The girl’s sounds match the length of her strokes, heaves of sighs and moans drawn out of her like poison from a wound. She knows The Boss is teasing her, waiting for her to ask, but she can’t bring herself to care; the girl can’t recall ever caring so much for her own pleasure, or someone caring so much for hers, and she doesn’t mind stretching it as long as she can. There’s a weight of anticipation in feeling The Boss’s fingers in her, so painfully sweet she thinks it could tear her apart. She splays her hands over The Boss’s back, her shoulders, brings her close again to taste her and the fervor of it pushes her hips further into The Boss’s hand, lurching pleadingly with her movements until The Boss’s fingers find and circle her clit. “Oh, God,” she sighs, The Boss’s face still inches from hers, her fingers stroking the length of the girl’s sex, softer and harder and insistent on its pleasure reaching every corner of her body. She feels incredibly heavy, needy, the heat inside her reaching for something beyond The Boss’s touch, beyond her content smile and the rhythm of their breaths against each other. Arching further into her, the girl covers The Boss’s hand with her own, tracing and deepening her ministrations, and whispers, “Boss...Boss, please.”

A small hum of approval from The Boss, and her hand trails from the girl’s sex up her torso, fingers still wet with her. “Let me show you something else,” The Boss says, her voice low. “With your honest permission, of course.”

In response, the girl cups The Boss’s face and kisses her again. The feeling isn’t satisfying in the least—she takes a moment to realize how quickly things in her life have accelerated to the point where kissing _The Boss_ is unsatisfactory—simply because her body is aching for so many other things she doesn’t know of yet. But the act has taken on a personal meaning to her; she knows from the way The Boss stiffened in her hands the first time she kissed her that this wasn’t a boundary she had planned on crossing. None of this was a boundary The Boss had ever planned on crossing. The girl had been greedy, wanting, presumptuous, but this woman had given in to her all the same—and not out of pity, but desire. She’d softened her, in the smallest of ways—softened her to herself. It was so surprisingly human of her, the girl thinks. So lovingly human. This was the slightest of things she could give The Boss in return.

“Thank you,” the girl says, breaking the kiss. “...For this.”

The Boss blinks as if processing the phrase, then threads her fingers through the girl’s, easing into a moonlike smile. Her eyes study the girl’s face with the same curious, appraising glint they held when she first climbed into her bed, but this time The Boss’s gaze seems more certain. “You really are a lovely girl,” she mutters.

When The Boss’s hand leaves the girl’s, it glides down her ribs, her waist, where it lingers for a moment as if it’s found a humble place to rest—waists were made for palms, the girl thinks, this fact is the purest of God’s inventions—and then cups her thigh along with her other hand, nails leaving precious crescent-moons in the wake of The Boss’s kisses trailing downward from the girl’s breasts, gentle, attentive. Her palms splay the girl’s thighs wide, and the girl feels a cheek caress her skin there. The girl thinks she should feel more embarrassed, ashamed even, but The Boss smiles so lovingly that the girl only wishes she could kiss her again and have every part of her upon her.

How many people have seen this smile, the girl wonders; is it a smile for friends or lovers or a kind of person who can’t be named?

She tries to stifle the yelp that escapes her lips when she first feels The Boss’s tongue in her, but to no avail; it comes as the slightest, most punctuated moan of surprise, all underlined with confusion and curiosity, the same sweet sense of allowance and vulnerability that’s consumed her this whole time. The Boss’s breath is wet on her skin as her tongue traces the girl’s lips inside and out, pressing its length and tip against her clit and the rest of her before entering deeper inside her. The sensation is equal parts sweet and full and delightfully foreign, but she and The Boss soon fall into a rhythm of motion that feels like something the girl has known since long before. As The Boss’s movements change in length and pace, the girl threads her fingers through her hair, driving her deeper, harder against her. It’s a purposeless act, the girl thinks—no motivation save the instinct of her own pleasure, wanting to feel The Boss against her, feel the vulnerability of her exposure dissipate and be filled with what, in another world, could be called _selfishness_. She isn’t used to seeking nor receiving pleasure without purpose beyond herself—isn’t used to receiving such pleasure that she can shape and choose whichever parts of it she likes.

 _“What do you like,”_ The Boss had asked as they began. The girl hadn’t known then, but as The Boss dips into her further, quickening her pace as the girl who will be called EVA rocks against her, heat building to a peak, she knows she likes _this_ , is willing to take it, to show The Boss everything she knows and everything she doesn’t. She wishes she could show The Boss half of the warmth and breathless starlight inside her, but all that escapes her lips to show it is a low moan and a litany of whispers and the sweep of a succession of shudders across her body in the candlelight.

The Boss is quiet in the moments that follow; they both are, save for the girl’s heavy breaths. She feels The Boss press a sighing cheek to her thigh. “Are you alright?” she murmurs.

Kneading the sheets between her fingers, the girl nods, eyes fixed to the ceiling, thinking of how The Boss must be looking at her: kindly, knowingly, more sweetly than the girl had ever dared to imagine her. “Yes, yes, I just...”

“Yes?”

The girl swallows, allowing her eyes to slowly meet The Boss’s, now laced with concern. “No, nothing bad, I just...I think that was...” Her voice drops as heat rushes to her face. “...The first time I ever actually...finished. Properly.”

She watches The Boss’s face shift to the faintest hint of surprise, then a grin, and finally a laugh. “That’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Not uncommon at all. Something of an honor for me, in fact,” she says. The Boss stretches along the mattress, resting her head beside the girl’s with a closeness of both affection and sympathy—the intimacy of comrades rather than lovers. _A survival tactic_ , the girl remembers. She lifts her eyes to the ceiling.

“There were two, even,” the girl says softly. “...I think.”

With pause, and a quiet, pained laugh, The Boss mutters, “They really don’t teach you girls anything.”

“Not like this,” says the girl who will be EVA.

Again she is Snow White, thinking of cursed apples in the hands of evil stepmothers and offered by snakes in the Garden of Eden. Snow White, loved in her sleep, loved _forcefully_ in her sleep by a prince undeterred by unmoving death; Eve, now knowing all, ashamed of her own nakedness, giving birth to mankind’s first murderer. Appetite is desire is death and The Boss is a beast, the girl thinks, somehow snake and apple in one, both offering and possessing, but at least she chooses which to be. This is what the girl thinks as she lies beside The Boss and her fingertips find her scar again, its length cutting into her breast and down to her womb. The girl can see its details more closely now—the innumerable ticks crossing its length, each one more frayed and ragged than the last as her eyes flow down The Boss’s body. Battlefield medicine, the girl knows, but these stitches are too crass to be justified even by that. As if they were each removed and re-stitched time and again, to carve their permanence into her skin. It’s another choice The Boss has made for herself.

One day, the girl who will be called EVA knows, a man will want her; _men_ will want her. They will be nothing like the wide-eyed boys at the Philosophers’ school; she will not be seventeen years old and they will not be kind to her. When she goes to their beds, she will do it willingly, place herself beneath them, want nothing for herself and wonder briefly how she can still say she went willingly. She will have nothing to give them—nothing inside herself, nothing to mark the two of them as anything more than two ships passing in the night, mere shades of individuals. She will be nothing more than a shadow in the shape of a woman.

But here, now, the girl thinks, she has something to give. One nameless woman to another, who showed her kindness and something like love. The scar ends just above where the girl begins to stroke, where The Boss is still warm and wet. Her fingers are clumsy, indiscriminate, rooting through both familiar and unfamiliar territory, feelings both inside and outside of her own body. The Boss rests her forehead against the girl’s; the girl cannot bring herself to lift her eyes, but she relies on The Boss’s breath as a map, a guide, for her motions and intentions. But the girl’s fingers twitch and press and The Boss’s breath still holds steady; her body is warm, but motionless. There’s a sternness to it that the girl cannot surpass.

The Boss’s fingers are in her hair. It’s comforting, in a way unlike a lover. “Don’t worry about it,” she whispers. “It’s just the kind of woman I am. We’re different kinds of soldiers.”

“But I want to give something back to you,” says the girl.

The smile that The Boss returns to her is the same as when they were carving the deer together—the one forged through fire, privileged to exist at all. The girl had felt such a jolt of shock, seeing it for the first time. Shock and gratitude. The latter still holds true, but she can’t be shocked by it anymore, knowing the multitudes The Boss holds inside herself. It’s a rare but kind smile, worn by a woman who has chosen to become everything she is. “That’s more than enough already,” she says.

The Boss closes her eyes. The girl who will be EVA watches.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!!!! @KoejiLaurant if you ever want to talk about evaboss pls hit me up


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